Teardown
The card is also quickly disassembled, because where there is not much on it, there is not much to disassemble. But we know that already.
PCB layout and components
Let’s start with the PCB. It is a bit more valuable and complete than yesterday’s minimal product, but still a horrendous cost-down. And since from time to time readers ask how and where I analyze the boards, I put a picture online. I didn’t need the multimeter from Rohde und Schwarz this time, it was too easy:
NVVDD is the most important voltage, as always, and so it results in a voltage converter design with a total of four phases and the resulting control circuits for NVVDD alone. So, you save another phase compared to the RTX 4060 Ti FE, but this is somehow still acceptable considering the significantly lower TDP. Considering possible hotspots and a higher efficiency, more phases would certainly have made more sense. But it should also be about the price and so a compromise has to be made again.
This all looks a bit meager at first glance, but it’s enough. A very cheap PWM controller is used for NVVDD (GPU core), FBVDDQ (memory) is solved via a trivial buck converter. For NVVDD, MSI uses UPI’s uP9512U, which is easier with the maximum four phases this time. There are no DrMOS, the voltage converters are all discrete with N-channel MOSFETS and separate low and high sides.
All used MOSFETs for NVVDD are normal priced products from NIKO-SEM (NIKOS). The PKE66BB used in all control circuits for the low side is an N-channel enhancement mode MOSFET for a maximum of 30 amps. The RDS(ON) is typically 2 mΩ and can rise to 2.6 mΩ when fully heated. The PK616BA used in all control circuits for the high side is also an N-channel enhancement mode MOSFET, but it is not decisive for the power to be produced. It is driven by a separate gate driver.
The one phase for FBVDDQ (memory) is also implemented discretely and consists of the same MOSFETs as the four NVVDD phases, but without double low-side. The currents are also significantly lower.
The 12V rails at the 6 2 connector are combined to a single rail directly after the socket, another one is connected to the PEG. I’ll get to that as well.
Where is the control of the flowing currents? Kaputt gespart!
NVIDIA is actually known for permanently monitoring every 12V rail by means of shunts and the voltage drop that occurs there. Thus, a suitable monitoring chip can be used to determine the flowing currents and the firmware can then throttle the power supply so that the maximum power target stored in the firmware is never exceeded. Interestingly, these shunts do not exist on any of the RTX 4060 boards and a suitable monitoring chip is also completely missing. At least MSI provides the board with one fuse per rail, how noble.
And I’ll repeat it from yesterday: NVIDIA declares the normal RTX 4060 as 115 watt cards and even talks about typical 110 watts during gaming. But that is exactly untrue. Yes, the values that can be read out via NVAPI are dutifully at 115 watts and below, but unfortunately they are not even close to correct. While the interface remains at 115 to 116 watts in the software, I actually measure over 130 watts on the rails and 4 games! That’s 15 watts more than the maximum allowed and still 20 watts above the communicated value for the games! Thus, the card is by far not as efficient as the interface suggests and the PR slides would like it to be. That would be over 18 percent more for gaming! But we’ll get to the exact values later and we see that not only the idle power consumption is a bigger construction site.
You need a special procedure to be able to control the single control circuits at all. The keyword is DCR (Direct Current Resistance). In the end, every component has very specific characteristics in this respect. To make it short: DCR is the basis for calculating or measuring temperatures and especially currents. But how does the controller find out exactly which currents flow in which control loop? The monitoring can be different, because there are – who is surprised – different methods for it.
We have already analyzed that the voltage transformers have been implemented at the technical level of 10 years ago. Intelligent Smart Power Stages (SPS), which measure the drain currents of the MOSFETS for the MOSFET DCR in real time, are pure utopia here. One replaces the whole thing with the much cheaper Inductor DCR in a discrete circuit, i.e. a current measurement via the inductive resistance of the respective filter coils in the output area. However, the accuracy of this solution is significantly lower and is also strongly influenced by fluctuations in the component quality. AMD has relied on this Inductor DCR for years, but it is no more than a rough estimate and becomes increasingly inaccurate especially at higher temperatures.
The BIOS is in the usual place on the back of the board and the generation of the remaining extra-low voltages is also as usual. So, there are no more special features. By the way, the PEG is also fused and has to do without the shunt for this.
And for the light blob and various control tasks, MSI gives the card a smaller MCU, after all.
The cooler
The two 9.8 cm fans (opening 10 cm) each have 9 rotor blades and are controlled together. The usual second control curve is unfortunately omitted on the GeForce RTX 4060. MSI also uses a simple fin heatsink in horizontal design and three 6 mm heatpipes made of copper composite material that are soldered and nickel-plated to the heatsink. The voltage converters are not cooled via the heatsink, but rely on the airflow. We’ll see later that this is enough. The pads are a bit better than Palit’s this time.
The backplate is made of light metal and only serves as stabilization. There is no need to report more here, because there is nothing.
- 1 - Einführung, technische Daten und Technologie
- 2 - Test System im igor'sLAB MIFCOM-PC
- 3 - Teardown: PCB und Komponenten
- 4 - Gaming Performance FHD (1920 x 1080)
- 5 - Gaming-Performance WQHD (2560 x 1440)
- 6 - Gaming Performance DLSS vs. DLSS3 vs. FSR
- 7 - Lastspitzen, Kappung und Netzteilempfehlung
- 8 - Temperaturen, Taktraten, Lüfter und Geräuschentwicklung
- 9 - Zusammenfassung und Fazit
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